Sunday, November 26, 2006

Right to work be asked to leave for any reason

Well, my appointment with the new endo is finally nearing, on Wednesday. I have to psych myself up to giving my whole, long, complicated case history and have it make sense to the endo in the short time allotted. Then I have to assure her that my bg patterns are what I say they are, an even bigger challenge. Then I have to get her to approve the pump. All in the first visit. Here's hoping.

My bg seems to have evened out a bit. I'm seeing better numbers and I've even gone back to 1/14. So who knows. I'm still getting a spike of 30-40 points at night, though. It was 10 before the Lantus and now it's like 11:15. This is enough to put me outside my safe zone, so usually I wait for it and take half a unit of Novolog. On nights like tonight, though, it's more insidious. I was at 75 before it happened, so I ended up with a number below what I can correct since I can't give anything smaller than a half unit. Sometimes all is well by morning, and sometimes it isn't. Grr.

Today I worked out my healthcare costs, which I normally do every year in June. But this year a lot changed since then. So here it is: Medication (insurance copays): $210, Medication not covered by insurance: $220, Office visits: $30, COBRA: $824, Total: $1283

That's per month, guys. It will be even more if I get a pump. I'm feeling a little bummed out by this, and not because we can't afford it, because currently we can. However, that's more money than I've ever made by working and that is a hard thing for me to contemplate. I could probably make more than that if I worked full time, but I haven't been able to do that in a long time and it had a very detrimental effect on my health when I did. Now with the diabetes, it's even more complicated. The things I need to have in order to stay healthy and to be able to perform at work just aren't compatible with the way things actually are. I'm not disabled enough for Social Security, either, because theoretically I *can* work. The fact that the jobs I can do don't exist doesn't bother them any. My last job was one of those jobs: I did contracting from home for a major tech company. However, I have never seen another (legitimate) job like it for someone with my qualifications, and I did start searching again as soon as my contract was up. I *could* work an office job with flexibility in breaks and with a couple (very easy) accomodations. The problem is that when you say "accomodations," suddenly your IQ drops 50 points. Suddenly if someone gives you the wrong information and you act on it, it was your incompetence. Since suddenly people don't want to talk to you, this happens more often than before. Suddenly, finishing your work in 1/3 the time it took everyone previously is suspicious rather than lauded; there must be mistakes somewhere if only they could find them. And suddenly, they're finding any excuse to "let you go," which is exactly what happened in the three jobs I held prior to this last one. I know it's commonly believed that discrimination lawsuits are an easy thing to bring and win, but it's not true. Sorry.